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On The Road: Sunday is Day Six: Midland in my Rearview Mirror

July 30, 2010 – 8:46 pm by Trey
Category » Random Thoughts

First leg: Midland, TX to Canyon, TX: 222 miles

Second leg: Canyon, TX to Tulsa, OK 381 miles

Music for first leg: none, Brad and I wouldn’t shut up long enough to listen to music.

Music for second leg: a bit of Sonia Dada.

What I read before bed that night: nothing.  I was too exhausted from driving.

Sunday Brad and I were outta there.

Did a bit of last minute driving around Midland to see a few places, then snatched him and hit the road.

But not before stopping to drop a postcard in a mailbox.  Problem was that, after I’d dropped it, Brad commented that the complex looked kind of old.

And abandoned.

I looked and couldn’t breathe.

This one last thing, this one last image of Midland, is of boarded over doors, broken windows, chipped paint, overgrown weeds.

“They might not even pick this mail up,” Brad said.

Turns out they did, but it look a helluva long time for that postcard to get where it was going.

So we left and  I realized it was over.

The weekend had gone well.  I hadn’t embarrassed myself, had mended a few fences, and had laughed quite a bit.  That’s a good few days.  Add in the book sales and all was well in my world.

I realized, too, that in an odd way, now that all the emotional bullshit and high school baggage has been jettisoned, I’m looking forward to the next one.  Thirty years ain’t that far off….

So we headed north for Canyon, Texas, home of West Texas State University.  At least, that’s what they used to call it, before the entire university went on the auction block and Texas A & M snatched it up for a regional campus.

(why in hell Texas Tech, mere miles down the road from WTSU, didn’t grab the university for their empire is beyond me…yet another example of Tech screwing up a nearly free lunch)

Every summer, the three band directors most influential in my life teach at a band camp.  Brad and I had each gone to that camp year after year after year.  It was foundational in our lives.

So we decided to stop and see those three men: Randy Storie, Bruce Collins, and Don LeFevre.

It was incredible.  Bruce and Don didn’t know we were coming until just a few minutes before and I think all of us got entirely more emotional than we were comfortable with.  I hadn’t seen Bruce or Don since high school graduation and it was the most amazing thing.

All three men were exactly the same with the same sense of humor and love for their students and their music.  We ended up grabbing dinner and sat for a couple of hours telling all the old stories and laughing and carrying on.

Randy Storie was my high school director and he and I battled it out constantly.  He threw me out of band about every ten minutes and the next day I’d come wandering back as though nothing had happened.

But Bruce Collins was the man who got me where I needed to be.  Brad and I were always together in music and he always did just a bit better than me.  More natural talent and a better innate ability to understand music.

And when I’d get frustrated at my inability to beat him in a chair tryout, I’d want to quit.

Bruce never let me.  Basically taught me that as long as I did as well as I can, then I have nothing to worry about, corny as that sounds.  But he also taught me to keep hammering away and eventually, I’ll get where I want to be.

That lesson has served me in good stead in my writing.  Keep writing, keep submitting, keep on keeping on and you’ll get somewhere.

But also in Canyon, we discovered that an old private teacher from Midland had managed to scratch and claw his way into a management position.

WTF?  This guy was a moron way back when.  In fact, I was never totally sure about him.  When I’d finish a lesson, he’d slap me on the ass as we walked down the hallway.  Never really knew if he was going to shove his tongue down my throat or not.

His was not a name I’d ever expected to hear again.

With that ringing in my ears like a two-by-four to the head, I drove outta Canyon and settled in for a few hours driving.

After a couple of hours, we  stopped in a tiny hamlet called Alanreed, Texas

I noticed, in this odd little gas station/market/hotel, they had some miniature bottles of Jack Daniels and Jim Beam.  Being contrary, I asked if they had Jameson’s.

“We got Jack and Jim.”

“No, Jameson’s huh?”

“Jack and Jim.”

“Too bad.  I’d love some Jameson’s.”

She looked at me like I was completely stupid.  “Jack and Jim.  And tequila.”

As though the sudden addition of tequila made everything okay.

So we left.  And drove and drove.  We talked all night, listened to a tiny bit of music, but mostly just talked.  The years between us, though we’ve kept in touch, melted away.  We jabbered and jabbered and then found ourselves in Tulsa for the night.

Nothing funny happened on the road.  Nothing dramatic or scary or anything else.  It was just two best friends putting miles behind them and making sure every connection was plugged in tight.

That’s what most of the weekend had been, in fact.  Making sure every friend out there who’d moved away or moved on or whatever was still connected.

To my delight, they all were.

On The Road: Day Five: of Cancer and Van Halen

July 29, 2010 – 10:02 pm by Trey
Category » Random Thoughts

Okay, enough farting around.  Time to get nitty gritty.

“Enough comedy jokes,” in the words of Steve Martin, who I seem to be quoting quite a bit lately.

Missouri and Oklahoma were fun, getting stopped in Dickens County was interesting, facing off with the security guards and the cops was fun.  Yeah, getting a drunk driver arrested before she killed someone scored me some cosmic points.

(I’m making an assumption there.  I could be wrong.  Whatever God there is might be looking down at me and thinking, ‘You fucking little tattle tale.  You nancy little Mama’s boy.’)

But Saturday got down to the barbed wire.  The afternoon session was why I had driven 1160 miles to get to Midland.  To see my school chums…sure…but to sell them a shitload of books.

The incredible lady organizing this whole shindig – Laura Wallin Stanley – wanted me to do a reading at the lunch.  I said sure and asked her what she wanted.

“Whatever,” she said.

“When?”

“Whenever.”

“Okay.  Where?”

“Where ever.”

Soooooo…this is a casual gig?

Brad and I hung out for a while and then just…sorta…gathered people around.  I think Laura maybe screamed once or twice and I went around and dragged people over, but that was about it.  And yet, when I finally looked at the audience, I was shocked.  There were probably 20 sitting there.  It was the largest reading of the tour.

And the scariest.

Holy balls, I shouldn’t have agreed to this.

See, the problem is that they all knew me.

Knew me.

Some of these people had known me since elementary school.  For a 43 year old man, that’s a helluva long time.  These people knew all the secrets. They remembered the pissy little boy and young man who was scared to death of the world and so shouted at it and screamed at it and wanted to kill it.

And they were sitting, staring at me.

Like they expected something.

“Uh…so a priest, a rabbi, and a prostitute walk into a bar….”

No, no, wrong speech.

Actually, I just started talking.  I don’t really remember my words.  I don’t remember if they were meandering (I assume) or goofy (I know) or insightful (I freaking doubt).

What I remember are the nods.  I remember nearly everyone agreeing with me, to some degree, when I talked about the ups and downs of fighting cancer.  They were with me when I talked about the frustration and anger and rage and exhaustion and everything else the chemo and cancer left on my doorstep.

Then an amazing thing happened.  Other people started talking.

Nearly everyone at that reading had a cancer story.  Their mother or sister, their brother or cousin.  The husband or wife, their lover, their child.

Cancer had touched everyone.  And for every section of my book I read, there was at least one person who’d had that same emotion or situation.

It was astonishing.  And gratifying.

Chris Mitchell, my friend who’d hosted the first of these readings in Columbia, had said something to me weeks earlier that struck me again – hard – that afternoon.

“You’re dangerously close to helping people with this book.”

What’s funny is that I’m not a helper.  I’m a cynical old bastard (honestly…the plate on my car says, ‘Cynics.’)

It wasn’t that I was helping people, it was that we were all helping each other.  And taking great comfort in each other’s company.

It wasn’t just cancer, though.  David LeMaster, one of the most brilliant and underrated playwrights in America today (and it kills me he’s a ‘Doctor’ now.  I remember this skinny, geeky kid in 7^th grade…although he seemed sort of Doctor-ish then, too!) talked a tiny bit about his Parkinson’s.

The talking, the Kumbaya moments, weren’t about fighting cancer.  Or Parkinson’s.  They were about fighting for control; fighting to keep The Other from controlling us, however The Other is defined.

Maybe it’s cancer.  Maybe it’s Parkinson’s.  But maybe it’s an addictive personality that forces us to suck down meth or heroin.  Maybe it’s depression or feelings of helplessness.

I wrote a story once (‘The Falling,’ in Bare Bone issue #5 if you wanna dig it up) that looked at the people who jumped out of the World Trade Centers during the attacks.  I couldn’t understand why those people had done that.  It’s a horrible way to die.  Staring at the street for 70 or 80 stories.

But what I realized it was those people’s way of controlling The Other.  In their cases, The Other was the terrorists.  Those people who jumped controlled their destiny.  They chose how they were going to die.

And talking about the cancer and Parkinson’s and whatever else was our way of controlling The Other and deciding how we were going to live our lives in the face of whatever The Other was.

(wow, that was fucking heavy…can someone pass me a shot of Jack?  And then a beer back?)

And not to be too mercenary, but I sold a ton of frackin’ books, too!

When you can help people and make enough to hit the strip club that night, that’s a damn good day!

Ain’t it?

So afterward, I went back to my skanky hotel and basked in the glow of feeling like the trip had absolutely been worth it.  I mean, yeah, seeing all my friends and catching up and screwing with the security guards had all been great.

But this extra little bit made everything so much better.  So perfect.  I could have ended the day right there and been perfectly satisfied.

But there was more.

There was the dinner and a night full of…well…mostly telling that damned security guard story!

By the time Brad, Harvey, and I got to the bar that night, everyone knew some piece of it.

A couple days ago, a Midland High school graduate (as opposed to Lee High School, we did both reunions together) even told me their side had heard something about it.

Hah.  Heheheee.  Bwaaahhhaaaaaa!

That ain’t nothing but funny.

So Saturday night involved lots of retelling of the story.

And yeah, I can admit that every time I told it, I told it better.  It’s not that I lied, I just figured out how to tell it better.

Yeah, that’s what we’ll say.  But there may have been some embellishment that had me facing something more than two wussed-out security guards…something like the entire D Company of Texas Rangers.

* shrug *

What’choo gonna do?

So Saturday night was about fun.

But it was also about one’s sins.  Atoning for the past and trying to wipe the slate clean.  To a number of friends, I called it cleaning off my internal desktop.

I was not a brilliant friend when I was younger.  I was hot-tempered, quick to anger, quicker to jump the wrong direction, quicker still to end everything badly in an explosion of verbal, if not physical, violence.

There were people I had treated like crap on my shoe.  Worse, maybe.  And I wanted to fix it with them.  Maybe this is getting older, feeling the pinch of a close hug from the fucking Reaper, I don’t know.  Maybe it’s just seeing things differently.

Kelly (for whom I drew Van Halen logos because she turned me on to what became my favorite group all through high school) was one.  Angela was one.  Brad, as brilliant of friends as we’d always been.  Harvey, to a smaller degree.  Amy and Debbie, to a degree.  A few others.

What I realized, as I clicked off those miles toward Midland, was that all the bullshit that had meant so much to me back when had been crappy bullshit.

I mean, if it’d been cool bullshit, interesting or important, that’s one thing.

But it was stupid.  Stupid enough that it has faded into the haze and mist.  I can’t really even remember any of it.  One of those I apologized too, a woman who has turned out to incredibly cool and mature and intelligent, said she didn’t even really remember anything like what I thought I remembered.

So maybe I’m atoning not for my actual sins, but my perceived sins.  Maybe they’ve grown larger in the passing of time.  Is that possible?  Could I have focused on them to such an extent that I actually grew them?

But the night wasn’t completely about sins.  It was mostly about connecting with good people and having a damned good time.  It was about laughing so hard beer came outta my nose.  It was about wondering if I just laughed so hard I peed myself when Karma Hancock started talking about learning hip hop dance moves cause she lost a bet with her students.  It was about remembering why I’d always loved Jody Gregory when we debated various Rush albums.

But it was bittersweet, too.

Because I knew, as the night ticked down, and as Brad, Harvey, Amy, and Debbie, and I closed the bar that it would be a while before I saw these wonderful, crazy, goobers again.

I love all of them, and a couple more who were unable to make it this weekend.  These were the people I grew up with, the people who helped me figure out who I was and who tried to make sure that who I was was who I needed to be.

The flaws I have are because I didn’t listen to them closely enough.

So thank you Harvey and Amy and Debbie.  And even Brad (hehehehe).

And then the lights went down.  And then the music went silent.  And then we left.

****

Wait!  Eddie Van Halen.  I forgot!

Okay, so everyone who knew me back in the day knew I was a freak for Van Halen.  My notebook, my locker, my car, my room at home…all covered in pix of the boys (this is original Van Halen, not VH2 with Sammy).  I even spent an entire semester of algebra drawing Van Halen logos for Kelly D. because she got me hooked on the band…and I was failing already anyway so what the hell?

Actually, as I think about it now, it was more than a little creepy.

So turns out Steven Quiroz, a percussionist from way back in time, spent the last bazillion years working for Hard Rock Café.  He’s also got a great band that’s played everywhere and opened for everyone.

And he and Eddie Van Halen are…I don’t know…best buddies or something.  There was something about trading a guitar for a leather jacket.  Steve’s got a picture of Eddie hanging on his damned refrigerator!  I mean, come one, how pedestrian is that?

So that’s it.  There is no slam bang end to this story except that a friend of mine is friends with Eddie Van Halen.

That’s so cool.

‘Cause you know I was in love with Valerie Bertinelli. Maybe Steve can introduce me to Eddie…who can introduce me to Valerie.

I know Eddie and Valerie are divorced…and they probably don’t talk…but dude…Valerie Bertinelli!

Steve, call me!

I’m a slacker…I’m a hacker…I’m a midnight snacker….

July 28, 2010 – 6:33 pm by Trey
Category » Random Thoughts

First of all, the reference in the title to today’s episode has to be sung to the correct Steve Miller song.

Secondly, I am definitely a slacker today.  At least in terms of the On The Road Entries.

It was a long day at work and a long meeting after and I just didn’t get the next entry written.  I promise it will be up tomorrow evening sometime.

Thanks for all the great comments here and at Facebook, I’m glad everyone’s enjoying the travelog.

And yet to come there is another reading, a night that didn’t end up facing off with security guards, a long-overdue dinner with three of the men who built the foundation of who I am, and an unbelievably looooooong drive back home.

So please come back tomorrow and I’ll do a little dance to entertain you.

On The Road: Still Day Four: Move Along Before You Get DIs

July 27, 2010 – 8:36 pm by Trey
Category » Random Thoughts

I wanted to cry.

My hometown stunned me.

Old.  Faded.  Sucked dry of energy and vibrancy.

On so many of the houses, the paint was old and chipped, blasted down by the west Texas wind.  Most of the yards were overgrown.  When I’d been young, homeowners nailed those yards constantly.  And if they didn’t, some kid who’d pulled his mower along behind him (sometimes while riding a bike) came along and sheared that shit down for a few bucks.

On my old block, Crockett Street, it was the same.  The entire flavor of the neighborhood was old, like an jar of picante that had been left too long on a shelf.  It was probably still edible, but it had no taste left, no bite or color.

Ditto the house I grew up in.  Even vaguely same color, though more blue and washed out than the gray my mother loved.  The cinder block fence my mother had built was still there.  So were the wrought-iron gates to that fence.  Exactly the same.

It was depressing.

It wasn’t that time had stood still, it hadn’t.  In fact, I was acutely aware of the slipping away of so many years, but it was like that same passing time had refused to allow any people to pass within it.

Everywhere was the same.  So many houses, so many blocks, so many streets and buildings and memories.  Like Rod Serling had reanimated and locked parts of my city down in a bubble that refused to let people move forward.

Ain’t I the hypocrite?  I was puttering about in the past, too, wasn’t I?  I only come to town for reunions and even while driving my block, I gave Brad the penny tour of crimes past.

“That’s where Zebern’s dad offed his mother with a 12-guage…that’s where the boy who fell off the Gulf building lived…that’s where the drunk chick tried to get into the wrong house through the bedroom window.  Shot through the head.  That’s where the fire was.  That’s where…that’s where…that’s where….”

At my old elementary school, Anson Jones, the most striking thing was playground equipment that had been new when I was there circa 1975.  It was still there.  Old and tired.

My junior high school had been remodeled and now it literally looks like a prison.

Trust me on this, I’ve been to a few in the last few years and I know.

It wasn’t quite as bad at my high school, but that’s a place where the football team frequently wins state championships and where the band constantly kicks the crap out of everyone.  So lots of focus and energy get put on it.

My old roller skating rink, my old Baskin-Robbins, a host of other places.  Seeing them left me melancholy.  What I remembered was a town that had worked hard to move forward and what I saw was a town that had stopped running altogether.

It’s possible that my memories were wrong, made shiny with the patina of nostalgia, but I don’t think so.  I think I have a fairly clear memory, and understanding, of what Midland had been in the 1980s.

But the worst for me was KCRS. 550 AM.  My step father had worked there, news director and voice of the station, and I spent hours and hours there.  I knew all the jocks and all the booths and most of the gear.  I knew the urgency bells on the AP news wire intimately.  I knew when to be quiet and when to talk by aural feel of each booth, rather than by the giant, red ‘On-Air’ sign that lit up.

The station is still around, though I don’t know where the new studios are.  And I realize buildings get old and outgrown and all the rest, but this place captured my imagination from the first moment I knew it existed.

My love of music began when I listened to songs the jocks played.  My love of news began when my step-father read it over the air.  My love of radio (an industry I worked in for a number of years) began at that station.

Seeing the building in such shape got to me.  I won’t say I cried; it is, after all, an inanimate object.  But I was certainly emotional.

That emotionalism exhausted me.  So after crashing in my skanky hotel and trying to understand what happened to my town, I geared up for the first party.  The first time I’d seen most of these mopes I went to school with in twenty-five years.

It was fabulous.

Brad and I hit the bar early and, honestly, I don’t remember much.  I remember a sea of faces and flashes of memories and slices of personal history that hadn’t swum to the surface of the mental swamp in decades.

Everyone was relaxed and laughing and having a great time and, for the first time ever with these people, it was completely chilled.  At the ten year reunion, there was still so much baggage and clique-ish bullshit that I didn’t bother with the 15 or 20 year.

But this night was incredible and completely devoid of any of that bullshit.

Except…well…Trey is still Trey, ain’t he?  Trey still hates The Man (weird, since he is The Man) and still really hates fucking wannabes who let a sliver, a micro-sliver, of power go straight to their heads where it fills the space between the rocks.

Yes, I had a moment.

Wasn’t my fault.  But these two assholes, security hired for the party (that MY graduating class paid for) spent the entire night flinging their weight around.

First of all, get over the too-tight Wrangler jeans, get over the tight black knit shirts, and damn sure get over the Chuck Norris cowboy hats.

(there are no pix of the security guys…so this is a still-pissed off artist’s interpretation!)

But mostly, stop it already with the handcuffs and cans of Mace.  You need two pair of cuffs?  Really?  And they have to be visibly strapped outside your jeans?  Not hidden in a cuff case?

Subtext: “Look how big my dangler is!”

So after the bar closes, Brad, Harvey, Eric, and myself are talking outside the bar.  On the public sidewalk (very important to remember).  Along come the Security Bobbsey Twins.

“Move along, gentlemen,” the first dork says.

And my partners started moving!  Because, like good Americans, when someone with a touch of authority asks you to do something, you do it.

Yeah.  Fuck that.

“No, no, no,” I said.  “This is a public sidewalk.  We’re staying until I – “

(notice I didn’t include my partners in the decision?)

” – decide we’re leaving.  They can’t put us off a public sidewalk.”

Oh, to see the look on Brad and Harvey’s face.  Like, ‘Dude, here we go with a Trey-thing.”

We talked a little longer, and I know I talked a little LOUDER (all the better to make a point, my dear) and then we headed for our cars.  In the parking lot, they tried to move us along again.  But this time it was different because it was a private parking lot.  I understand that.

However, we – apparently – weren’t moving fast enough.  They came back, their damned cuffs banging against their skinny asses.  “Move on or you’re gonna get some DIs.”

First of all, what the fuck is a DI?  I’ve been a cop a while and I have no idea.  I wanted to say, “You moron, it’s DWI.” (driving while intoxicated)

Brad wanted to say, “You moron, it’s PI.” (public intoxication)

I think Harvey wanted to say, “I’m a Federale, get the crap outta my face.”

What we said instead was, “We haven’t had anything to drink.”

Dude, we are tough.

See, here’s the thing.  They accused us of having something to drink.  And they wanted us to drive outta their parking lot.  Isn’t that…like…aiding and abetting in the commission of a misdemeanor?

While this is going on, two drunk chicks stagger toward us.  I’ve seen drunk in my line of work a few times and I’ve never seen anything like this.  They couldn’t speak.  Hell, they could barely stand.

One of the women is saved from driving by a nine-hundred year old guy in a truck who gives her a ride.

“Well, that’s going to be an interesting negotiation in ten or fifteen minutes,” I said.

But the other woman goes to her car on the far side of the lot.

My heart sank.  I wasn’t in my jurisdiction, or in my county.  Crap, I wasn’t even in my state!  But she was going to kill herself or someone else.  I knew it in my bones.  I’ve seen it too many times before.

When she started the car, put it in gear, turned on the lights, and passed out with her foot on the brake, I was done.  I went to her car and tried to talk to her.  I gave her my best everything.  I talked for a good seven or eight minutes straight and couldn’t get her to turn that car off.

Eventually I go back to my partners, who had never taken a step in my direction to help thank you very much, and as we’re trying to figure out what to do, the Midland Poh-Poh rolls up.

Headed straight for us.

See, I think those goober security guards (see drawing above) called them because we weren’t hitting the road fast enough.  Yeah, they’ve got all the gear and their Chuck Norris hats, but they ain’t got the eggs to step up.

The officer drives over and I explain who I am and what’s up.  Then I point at the drunk woman in her car.

“Easiest DWI you’re ever going to get.”

He took off.  Cloud of dust kind of speed.  I hope Tweedle-Dumb and Tweedle-Dumber were watching.  Hah, take that, Chuck Norris sycophants!

Now, normally, field sobriety takes fifteen or twenty minutes.  Officer Midland gets the woman out of the car, I see her head go back and forth a few times (horizontal gaze nystagmus test, no doubt) and then –

BOOM!

She’s in cuffs and in the back of the squad car.  In…I don’t know…half a minute?  Maybe less?

Harvey just shook his head.  “Man, you fucked up her night, didn’t you?”

Maybe I did.  But I may have also saved someone’s life.  Both my mother and my wife have been hit by drunk drivers and I simply don’t give a shit for someone who gets behind the wheel hammered.

F.U.C.K. T.H.E.M.

What’s depressing, though, is that I’ve not had a DUI in my own jurisdiction (1160 miles from where I stood at that moment) since last October.  I gotta come to Midland to find one?

That’s a helluva commute for a DUI stat.

And I probably won’t get any Illinois stats if I’m making arrests in Texas.

Damn, I hate when that happens.

On The Road: Day Four: Welcome Home (Sanitarium)

July 26, 2010 – 11:16 pm by Trey
Category » Random Thoughts

Lubbock, TX to Midland, TX: 109 miles

Music for this leg: Metallica’s Master of Puppets, featuring ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’

What I read before bed that night: Three Of A Kind, by James M. Cain.  Three short novels including Career in C Major, The Embezzler, Double Indemnity

Understand, the drive from Lubbock to Midland is for shit, aww-ight?

I love the desert and I love west Texas, but holy balls, Batman, that drive kills people!

It’s 109 miles of squat.  Endless, scrub-covered, mesquite-dotted, handful of oil drilling rigs populated squat.

So 109 miles later I’m in Midland and first up?

A second heart attack!

Johnny’s Barbeque!

Alive and kicking!

See, this joint (memorialized in the brilliant, but sadly unpublished Trey R. Barker novel Exit Blood) has burned about four-hundred and ninety-eight times.  And yet in spite of it being nothing but a grease trap, it never burned all the way.

I had thought the last fire did it in.  Apparently not.

That is where I learned to eat barbeque.  Where I learned to savor a sweet sauce and enjoy the bite of a hot sauce.  Where I learned what a hot link is and how brisket is best cooked slooooooooowwww.

Also where I realized there was no decent-folk way to eat ribs.  Gotta dive in and walk away messy.  If you ain’t messy, then you ain’t trying.

Sort of like sex….

So then I gawked at the nothingness that was downtown.  It had been fairly vibrant in my day, but now there were weeds in the streets and the buildings seemed to wheeze with old age and exhaustion.

When I grew up, the city was full of major oil companies and there was money and vibrancy (not that those automatically go together) and projects and energy.  But those companies bugged out years ago.  Only thing left now is independent operators…wildcatters…and their offices aren’t downtown.

The emptiness left me a little melancholy.  That would grow over the weekend.

Okay, so now the hotel.  I was looking for a particular hotel – the West Wind – but couldn’t find it.  When I was a wee tike, my step-paternal grandmother and step-aunt (how’s that for Arkansian?) stayed in that hotel when they came to town.

I was six or seven and lemme tell you, seeing my 16 year old step-aunt in a bikini was the first time I realized girls were different.  I wasn’t sure why, or what to do with that information, but it rocked my socks, baby.

But I also wanted to stay at this particular place because my biological father once told me he’d stayed in that hotel in the 1960’s, and that his father had stayed there back in the late ‘40s when he was working for a geophysical outfit.  Mostly, everything my sperm-donor told me was bullshit, but what if there was some sliver of possibility?  Shouldn’t I take the chance to scare up some old ghosts?

Except I couldn’t find the damned place.  So I found some other skank-pit and checked in.  I love nasty places.  The tenants are always fun and for whatever reason, I like places where I’m not entirely sure I’ll get out alive.

But then, after checking in, I was headed to see a friend and I stumbled across the West Wind.  I made an illegal U-turn, motored back to the first hotel, checked out, and honked on down to the West Wind.

I walk in and on the phone is the quintessential west Texas hustler.  Boots and a silk shirt unbuttoned to his moobs.  Big, thick, plastic hair with what was, I’m guessing, about eight gallons of Brylcreem.  And covered in bling.  Rings.  Bracelets.  And the most horrifying gold necklace I’ve ever seen.

In the shape of Texas.  With cubic zirconia where Midland is.

Hand to God, I swear it.

I coughed up a lung trying to cover my laugh and the guy makes me wait for…I don’t know…a week…while he finishes a phone call about some $725,000 land deal.  I wanted to yell to the guy on the other end, “It’s west Texas…there ain’t no land worth $725,000!”

But I didn’t.  I patiently waited for him to finish, at which point he checked me in and said, “Eighty bucks.”

“Total?” I asked.

“Two nights.”

“Taxes and stuff?”  I pulled out my credit card.

His face crumpled.  “Cash?”

I shook my head.

“Well, whatever.  Eighty bucks.”

What’choo think the odds are that he’s got some sort of cash/credit card/transfer/withdrawal/slightly-illegal-sleight-of-hand tom foolery that kept my eighty bucks off the books?

I fell in love with the nasty-ass room.  I hated that it smelled like a tobacco barn, but everything else was great.  The bed sloped from head to foot and tilted slightly left.  The table tottered and had cigarette burns all over it.

And the walls were orange.  Serious orange.  Not that fake-ass, watered down bullshit orange you see at McDonald’s or somewhere.

Real orange.  Super-deluxe orange.

In this pic, the walls look yellow, as does the comforter, but trust me.  It’s a crappy camera phone and the curtains were open.  The walls are orange.

The comforter, however, is actually yellow.

I suspect the wall paint was a mistint and the hotel got it free…or damned cheap.  Like a buck a gallon or something.

The TV was plugged into the wall.  No problem.  So was the lamp.  Again no problem.

Except the wall outlet was controlled by the light switch on the other side of the room.  To have the light, you had to have the TV.  To have the TV, ditto the light.  Matched set.

Hehehehe…I love shit-hole hotels.

And I love them because of the guests.  Like the first one I saw at this place, peeking furtively out of his room at me.  A few minutes later, he gathers up his nuts and comes out to see what’s up and fill his ice bucket.  And what do I see?

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, an ankle monitor.

Dude’s on parole or house arrest or sentenced to the West Wind.  Who knows.  I wanted to ask him what his jolt was for, but he skittered away too quickly.

Next up?  A crack whore with no teeth who wouldn’t shut the hell up.  While making an incredibly sloooooowww trip to the same ice machine (damn ice machine gets more action than I do!), she wanted to know all about me.

At first, I just thought she wanted to pop me for a quick half and half in the janitorial closet.  But then I realized the questions were more invasive.

She was trying to figure out what I might have in my room or my car.

Chick was casing me!  Live and in person.

And I felt sort of oddly proud that she considered me worthy of robbing.

This, baby, is my kind of crowd.  Sort of a spiritual homeland, which is odd considering I’m such a snob.

Because these people are the most interesting.  These people fight for their lives every damn day.  They fight against poverty and racism, against their own self-destructive tendencies, against institutionalized marginalization, against mental defects they neither understand nor recognize.

And because of that fighting, even when they’re being complete idiots and fighting those trying to help them, they are more interesting than any rich boy who got everything through his family connections and crybaby’s about how tough life is (and I include myself in that crybaby.  Sometimes I get deep in my head and the whole world totters on the brink….)

Suck my ass, bitch.  Get down outta the Wall Street Ivory Tower and see what life really is.

These are the people who populate my fiction.

The guys my best friend Brad and I saw I in the shooting gallery.  The gang bangers we saw milling outside what used to be a very cool soul food café.  The people who live within two blocks of an oil tank farm and have to breathe those pollutants every day.

These are the interesting people and it was good to see them again, to revel in their interestingness.

But there is another reason I write about them, I think.  For as much time as I spend deep in my own head, I don’t like personal introspection too much (it makes me wildly uncomfortable).  But I write about these people because I’m absolutely convinced that, were it not for a few friends who’ve stuck with me, I would be these people.

Okay, enough of that.  Because that’s not what you want to read about, is it?  You want to read about the reunion!

Come back tomorrow and we’ll have a short tour of Midland, then we’ll discover why I detest wannabe security guards so much.

It’s gonna be fun!

On The Road: Day Three (point) Five: Slinging Meat and Bullshit

July 25, 2010 – 7:58 pm by Trey
Category » Random Thoughts

Still in Lubbock….

In our previous episode, you’ll recall, I made it to Lubbock without getting arrested or falling asleep behind the wheel and driving into an on-coming semi.

So now we’re gonna talk about the reading, a major part of this entire trip.

First, some history.  Bryan Hicks and I worked the same deli back in college.  We played in the same band, ate the same food, drank the same booze, and got drunk at the same jazz club.  We were very nearly inseparable. (actually, what’s the story with boys whose name begins with B?  Brad was my Bryan and vice versa, at different points in my life…wow, creepy).

During Christmas, at the deli where we worked, Bryan and I built meat and cheese trays.  We’d do about 496,827 a day.  Paid under the table, didn’t have to wear the uniform, and laugh and carry on all damn day.  Usually to the detriment of those working around us who had a regular job to do.  We’d get there at 5 or 6 a.m. and hopefully be done by midnight.  For two…three…weeks at a shot.  Then we’d be dead for a month.

But rolling naked in all the cash we made!

(and hopefully, Eric, my IRS agent friend, isn’t reading this too closely!)

So Bryan and Rachel, for whatever psychotic reason, decided to host a reading.  At their house.  With their impressionable kids nearby.

Dorks.

Now remember, I haven’t seen Bryan’s scraggly ass since U2’s Zoo TV Tour.  It’s been a while, is my point.

He opens the door, immediately insults me, I toss one back, and then Rachel orders us to start cutting meat and cheese for the party.

It is EXACTLY like the deli!

Holy Balls, Batman!  Will we be rolling naked later?

(hehehe, closer to the mark than you yet realize, gentle reader!)

The reading was the most fabulous of the trip so far. Bryan and Rachel, after telling me it would be a handful of people, invited everyone in Lubbock who could read…more people than you might think.

I’d wanted to change into something a bit nicer but Bryan looked askance at me, shrugged, and said something, “It’s you.”

Fair enough.

There were a number of incredibly cool people there, including a guy from Serbia who I harassed mercilessly all night about being from Siberia (cuz I’m a nice guy like that) and a woman from Stanton.

Now, I grew up in west Texas, only a handful of miles from Stanton (population…like…sixteen) and I never, in my life, actually met someone from Stanton.

So not only was she from that tiny, tiny hamlet, she was hot!

And intelligent!

And she could read!

Come on, what’re the odds?

Okay, quit thinking about her and focus on the reading.  Right, so, okay, Bryan gave me an introduction that, like the one Chris had given me a few nights before in Columbia, almost made me cry.

No shit here, guys.  I’m emotional sometimes and I’m a hard ass sometimes.  But both of their introductions touched me deeply.  Sometimes, in the grind and bang of life, it’s hard to remember who you are, especially when you are a writer and thus don different personalities.  But hearing what those two brilliant and wonderful men had to say left me choked up.

At least…I think it was them.

Who the hell knows?  Might’a been the chicken bones caught in my throat.

So I read and joked and we talked about cancer and police work and had a really great time.  Everyone threw back as hard as I threw at them and that made the night swim fabulously.

Okay, this is the nearly X-rated part of the evening.  I’m not really sure how it happened.  I simply don’t remember.  Or maybe I don’t want to remember.  But the reading became, toward the end, all about the –

- Boobs.

Yeah, that’s what I said.

Because I’m a rock star, baby!

Yeah, yeah, I realize there is more testosterone in those boobs than I normally prefer, but hey, you get my age, you’ll take whatever is flung your way.

Don’t worry, things got better.

That hot chick?  From Stanton?

Yeah, baby.

And the other hot chick?  A hot red-head?

Yeah, baby.

It was a good night, lemme tell you.  Sold lots of books, and signed more boobs than I’ve ever seen personally outside of my junior high school locker room.

(“There must be…57 tits up there!”  Name that comedian and I’ll send you a free copy of either one of the new books, your choice)

After the reading, we all went to Jazz, a local cajun bar.  Back in the day, Bryan and I and Cary always went there on Thursday nights for the booze and the band.  And Bryan and Cary always embarrassed me by asking for nachos at a damn Cajun place.  Can’t take them anywhere.

So we go and the grill is already closed – thus no nachos – but the drummer remembered us!  Twenty years later and he’s still there, banging the skins.  The rest of the original band was long since dead, but James is still strokin’ it Thursday and Sunday nights.

In celebration of the night, I ordered a round of Jameson’s and then we drank entirely too much beer.  I don’t normally get drunk.  A little buzzy sometimes, but not drunk.

I was drunk.  Embarrassingly so.

I remember ending up at Whataburger (Texas chain of fast food joints) at 3 in the morning and then going to bed in a bed too short for me, in a room with ‘Sweet Carolina’ painted in huge, eight foot tall letters on the wall.  And I think the other walls were…red?  Maybe?

I was really drunk.

And so the booze, and Bryan/Rachel/Cary/Nicole’s forcing it on me, is why there is no reading material for the night in Lubbock.

It was not my fault.  None of it.

And there are no pictures so you can’t prove otherwise.

Tune in tomorrow, kiddies.  Tomorrow, we’ll get to my hometown: Midland.  And we’ll get to the first night in twenty-five years I’d seen most of my class chums.  And if we get far enough, there will be Wrangler jeans and cowboy hats and handcuffs and Mace and drunk driving and more poh-poh.

Hah.  I really know how to party…

…for an old guy.

On The Road: Day Three: “Hey, ain’t you the poh-poh?”

July 24, 2010 – 7:00 pm by Trey
Category » Random Thoughts

Stillwater, OK to Lubbock, TX: 411 miles.

Music for this leg: a disc containing one cut each from every album on a friend’s Top Ten Desert Island Records, Metallica’s ‘Death Magnetic.’

What I read before bed that night: uh…well, we’ll get to why I couldn’t read….

I hit the road early out of Stillwater but made a quick stop at a convenience store for a banana (and listened to two guys in a battle of the dullwits expound on why some football team or other blah blah blah).

I moved quick through the rest of Oklahoma, including a successful navigation through Oklahoma City.  Was quite proud of myself considering I hadn’t been through there in eighty-gabillion years.

Then I hit Texas and it was nirvana.  Home.  The Sacred Homeland.  Aaahhhhh….

The amazing thing was, when I crossed back into Texas, I actually felt the accent come back.  All of a sudden, my texts were slower and more drawl-y, my g’s disappeared from the ends of everythin’.  ‘Y’all’ and ‘fixin’ to’ exploded back into my vocabulary.

It was like I had no oral control at all.

(Go ahead, get the jokes in now.  Best one wins…I don’t know…something.)

So I’m driving along, texting and phoning (how did I ever survive before the advent of tech?), and I find myself in Holliday, Texas.  A charming little oil hole of about 28 people.

Got some gas, did a postcard, and – since they had no post boxes – went on a hunt for the post office.  Found it, mailed it, and then genuflected at the sign pointing to nearby Archer City (where the brilliant ‘The Last Picture Show’ was filmed) and then –

- found a jail.

You can’t see very well, but the sign at the top says, ‘Holliday Jail, 1925.’

Man, that would’a been some hard time.  Two rooms, each about ten by ten with a metal bed and a tiny window on the far side about eight inches tall and eighteen inches wide.

Concrete slabs and locking metal doors.

That’s it.

(note to self: don’t get arrested in Holliday, they just mean)

I snap a few pix and hit the road again – hard – because I’m feeling waaaaaay behind at this point and I’ve got lots of miles to make before dark.

So I speed.

‘Cause that’s…you know…what I do.

But I’m always prepared to take the ticket.  I’m always prepared to pay the ticket.  I understand how this works.  Break the law, pay the fine.  I’m good with that.

But it’s been years since I’ve been stopped.

What…me worry?

Except…see that Texas Department of Public Safety squad car way down there?

Yeah, well, he saw me.

“Damn…how am I going to tell my Sheriff I got arrested in Texas?”

(actually, this question will come up again, dear reader)

Before he even got behind me, I pulled over, shut the car off, put one hand out the window and the other over the passenger seat headrest, and waited.

For…I don’t know…like half a hundred years or something.

Son of a bitch gets outta his car, checks his hat, the crease in his pants, looks at his watch, and finally gets around to me.

Let me be serious for a minute.  I do not flash my badge.  Ever.  I hate it when other cops do it to me and so I absolutely refuse to do it to others.  It’s my line in the sand.

But we are talking about sand.

“License and registration, please.”

“Absolutely,” I said.  “But you should know first there is a handgun in this car.  It’s unloaded and locked in a box in the trunk.”

He glared at me.  “Can we get to the license?”

I was surprised.  Never quite had that attitude before.  “Sure, my license is in the door panel.  Can I reach for it?”

I prefer a more passive-aggressive approach.  I’ll lay down a path of clues and if the officer is smart enough to figure them out, rock and roll.  If not, no problem, I was speeding anyway.  This time, the clues included stopping the car, leaving my hands where he could see them, telling him about the gun, asking to retrieve my license.

All…really…easy…clues.

Didn’t say I wanted to use an Einsteinian passive-aggressive approach.

He paused for a long moment, then said, “Who you work for?”

“Bureau County Sheriff’s Office.”

“Ain’t no Bureau County in Texas.”

I wanted to say, “Really?  You sure?  There are 254 counties.  Are you absolutely certain there isn’t a Bureau County?  After all, there is a Burlson County, and a Burnet County.”

I did not say that.  Because I’m at a more respectful place in my life, I try to be tactful (remember that, dear reader, cause when I get to Midland and face off with some wannabe cops, tact goes straight out the fucking window).

So he silently took my license back to his car.  When he came back, he snapped my license at me, and said, “Warning on the speed,” and stomped off.

“Have a nice day,” I called after him.

Okay, that last part happened in my head, where I could be full of vim and vinegar and piss.

Suck my aaaaaaasssssssss, was what I really wanted to say to that damn 12-year old and his Chuck Norris bullshit hat (and again, when we get to Midland, that Chuck Norris bullshit hat will make another appearance…actually two Chuck Norris bullshit hats will appear).

Come on, there is no reason to treat anybody that way.  If I’ve pissed you off that badly, write me the damned ticket!

So off I go, yelling at various friends on the phone – and texting I’m sure, damn I’ve gotta get better about that – about what a dork he was.

Then, magically, I’m somehow in Lubbock.  Jewel of the High Plains.

And it’s only been seven or eight hours.  My back is broken, my right ass hurts, my head hurts, I’ve eaten enough aspirin to qualify me for a trip to the ER and a stomach pump.

And I’m cranky.

(I know, right?  Hard to believe!)

Entirely ready to get out of the car, I find my Mom’s new house (and she’s sort of offended, I think, that I wasn’t bowled over.  She and my aunt have done a ton of work and it’s great work, but it’s a house.  Four walls and roof kind of thing.  I don’t get too excited.)

Then we had a disagreement over Mexican food.  I told her Mamarita’s, great food from back in the day.

“No,” she said, and named another place, a place she’d discovered and wanted me to try.

Aww-ight, let’s give it a snort.

It blew!  I mean seriously blew.  It was terrible.  And I paid!  I mean, come on, how’s that work?  I don’t mind paying, not at all, but I don’t want it to suck.

We then spent the next little while driving around Lubbock with me playing tourist and rubbernecking.  “Ooooh….  Aaaahhhh.”  And arguing about the proper name of a highway.  Was it the Marsha Sharp Highway…the deserving Texas Tech Women’s Basketball coach who won a national championship?  Or was it the Brownfield highway, because it went to Brownfield and had been so named since Moses wandered down off the mountain?

We did not resolve that particular argument.  But since she lives there and I don’t…I suspect it’ll remain the Marsha Sharp Highway.  Better that than the Bobby Knight Highway (Texas Tech’s other coaching ‘great.’)  Or maybe the Bobby Knight Chairway.  hehehehe…get it?

And then?  Oh, look, kiddies, our time is up.

Because there was simply so much to do and see in Lubbock, I’ll have to continue tomorrow.  Really, I didn’t realize how loooooong I could write.  Should’a seen that coming, I guess.

But be sure to come back because we have yet to  get to the actual book tour reading, wherein Trey and Bryan build meat and cheese trays just like we did twenty damned years ago at Benaglio’s Deli.

Wherein Trey signs boobs.

And there are photos.

Hehehehe…come back tomorrow, boys and girls.

On The Road: Day Two: Wow…this is a long drive….

July 23, 2010 – 7:18 pm by Trey
Category » Random Thoughts

Columbia, MO to Stillwater, OK: 445 miles.

Music for this leg: Joe Ely’s ‘Letter to Laredo,’ Johnny Cash’s American Recordings 1, 2, and 3, and a sample of The Cure.

What I read before bed that night: Umberto Eco’s ‘On Literature.’

Okay, so first of all, before I got to Columbia, I discovered Mark Twain.

(yeah, yeah, I should have written this part yesterday, but I got my geography all fouled up so bite it, okay?)

I’m bopping along and I look to the right.

And see Mark Twain.

A really big Mark Twain.

That little plaque between his legs is just about gut high, so you can see he’s tall.

Seeing that, I had to whip around on the highway and snap some pix.  But what’s funny, at least to me, is that he was connected to nothing.  It’s not like it was a park or a memorial or anything.

To the east is a trailer that had its best days fifty years ago (and they weren’t all that great).  To the west is a mechanic’s garage that is, I suspect, where the husband hangs out after the wife in the trailer beat his ass and hits him in the head with a can of Lucky Lager.

So, once I left Columbia, I motored west into Kansas City.  On the way, I had a massive sneezing fit that very nearly left the car in the ditch.  I’m not talking about your Aunt Sally’s polite little sneezes, I’m talking about industrial grade, blowing chunk outta my nose kind of sneezing.

[Well, too bad for you.  I recorded some of the fit on my phone, sent it to my computer, but can't get it to load in the blog.  If you'd heard it, you would have heard a monster of a sneeze, then a moan, and then, "Ahhhh...fuck."]

It lasted a half hour?  Maybe more?  Got so bad I had to pull over.

Apparently, I’m allergic to Kansas.

Then, when I get driving again, I discover the road is waaaaaayyyy longer than I’d realized.  I drive and drive and drive and there is nothing but more and more Kansas.

Flint Hills, this stretch is called.  More than 212,375, square miles, just about 200 miles top to bottom.

Holy Balls, Batman.  Really?  Nearly a quarter million miles and that’s what I’m driving through?

(Yeah, I stole those off Google Images.  If you took those pics, let me know and I’ll absolutely post credit.)

So not only a billion miles of nothing, but also filled to overflowing with…

…cows.

Hundreds and thousands of cows.  Hundreds of thousands of cows.  Mile after mile; cow after cow.

Reminded me of Stephen King’s ‘Children of the Corn.’ I kept waiting for Malachai to show up and slit my throat.

Call him Cow-achai, I guess.

And all those frakin’ cows stared at me.

Cuz they knew.  They knew I’d faced off with their brethren in Bureau County.  I know they sensed that I’d herded, and then made fun of, their spiritual brothers and sisters in Illinois.  They knew that I considered them – basically – pre cooked barbeque.

If those fences hadn’t been there, I don’t know…it would have been ugly, and I’m pretty sure I would have come out on the losing end of any bovine altercation.

(you wanna read any of those stories…they’re all under CopStories on the blog)

Finally, long looooonnnnggg after Rapture and Armageddon and the Aztec end of days and whatever else might be coming down the pike, I got to Oklahoma.

And at the first rest stop?

Way back when, I wrote a story called ‘Tom Mix Wept.’  It was about a woman who could heal people simply by touch but couldn’t find anyone to love.  I still think it’s a great story that got overlooked (man, ain’t a big ego a wonderful thing?)

Anyway, Tom Mix was from Oklahoma, which I knew but hadn’t thought about.  I mean, come on, how much Tom Mix trivia are you going to have at the front of your brain?

So they have him as art at the rest stops.  Sort of oddly cool, I guess.

When I got to Stillwater, my Grandmother was waiting and it was wonderful.  I hadn’t seen her in probably 17 or 18 years and it was fabulous to be able to sit down with her again.  She is a wonderful woman who’s volunteered at a library for something like 418 years, raised five kids, and who bops along in life reading her books and listening to her classical music.

We hung out for a while and then my aunt and some of her chi’drens showed up.  Then some library people and it was a party!

The reading – which became about not reading the book but instead talking about it – was great.  I sold some books and signed some books and ain’t that what all this driving and a-pimping is about?

I think my Grandmother has some pictures of the soiree, but I haven’t seen them yet.  When I do, if I look like an authorial stud, I’ll post them.  If I look like a wuss begging for money, you’ll never see them.

Afterwards we ate and then she and I looked at old pictures and I found some baby pictures of mine I hadn’t seen before.

There you have it.  More Baby Trey than has ever been gathered anywhere.  And yeah, it was a cool Halloween costume, but man oh mama, could it have been more racist?  And I think the back said, “Frito Bandido.”

After copying the pix, we stopped at the library so I could check email.  Nothing quite like a dear friend sending you a fairly racy picture while your Grandmother sits RIGHT NEXT to you.  I have no clue if she saw it or not, but I’m guessing this blog post probably busts me pretty hard, huh?

Then I crashed because I was exhausted.  The trip had been longer than I’d thought and tomorrow wasn’t shaping up to be much better.  Damn, next time I’ll have to actually look at a map before I leave, maybe plan a little better.

But of course I couldn’t hardly sleep.  By 4:30 in the morning, I was ready to go.  I piddled around until about 5:15, got up and was ready for the road at 6.

Grandma wasn’t quite done with pictures yet.  So we went through a few more.

And then she wanted to feed me, bless her heart.  A big breakfast.  I passed.

“How about a muffin?”

I passed.

“A glass of orange juice?”

I passed.

She snorted, but let me go.

And thus began the leg of the trip that would see me face to face with the police (not the last time that would happen), face to face with a jail, and be within shouting distance of where ‘The Last Picture Show’ was filmed.

On The Road: Day One: Trey’s Goin’ A-Churchin’

July 22, 2010 – 5:58 pm by Trey
Category » Random Thoughts

Princeton, IL to Columbia, MO: 313 miles.

Music for this leg: jazz hard bop: Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Miles Davis ‘Boplicity.’

Bedtime reading that night: Spenser Well’s ‘Pandora’s Seed.’

I took last week off from work.  No crackheads, no mopes or whacks.  Just me, driving the open road in a convertible Mustang…wind blowing in my hair…no deadlines or phones, no texts or emails or anything.

Yeah.  Except I have no hair so that won’t work out too well.  Plus, if I drive with the top down I’m likely to burn the crap outta my skull.  And I had my phone…which meant phone calls and texts (and no, I did not text while driving…80…in a construction zone….)

Damn, boy, ain’t you the cops or not?

To be honest, I realized what an idiot I was being and dialed my texting and driving somewhat back after Chris Mitchell called and yelled at me.  Then back further when another friend in Princeton yelled at me.  Then further still when I got stopped by the poh-poh in Texas.

So the trip was both to attend my 25^th high school reunion and to tour the two new books.  The Cancer Chronicles (the complete collection of blog entries the year cancer and I fought mano-a-mano in a dark back alley) and Remembrance and Regrets (a collection of dark crime stories).

Much like crack hoes, you can’t sell what you ain’t pimping so I hit the road.

First day’s stop was Columbia, where two of my dearest friends live.  With kids and a respectable house and everything!  Chris and Lori Mitchell agreed to host a reading and actually had me do it at their church.

I’ve been in a church like…twice…in thirty years.

(cue dramatic and slightly scary music…like the better sections of ‘Carmina Burana.’)

I need not have feared.  While it is Baptist, it ain’t no Baptist church I ever seen, Mama.  Hip as a new replacement, cool as an ice box, filled with extremely pleasant people, many of whom came to the reading.

I sold a pile of books, ate some cookies (‘cookies on the front seat,’ which became code for…I shit you not…SMBD sex.  I told you it wasn’t a standard church!), and had a great time.

The reading was fantastic.  I read a few pieces and answered a ton of questions about my cancer, including a question from Chris, who asked me what I learned.

“Uh…duh,” I said.  “It’s me…Trey…when have I ever learned from anything I’ve done?”

Okay, I don’t think I said it that way.  It was probably more like, “Duh…this is Trey…didn’t learn dick.”

Chris asked me about the take-away.  A year of surgery and chemo and there had to be some take-away.

I couldn’t think of anything.  Actually, it was a little embarrassing.  Not as much as constantly calling one of Chris and Lori’s kids Petey…who was the long-since dead dog, but embarrassing nevertheless.

Because I thought there should be some answer.  I thought there should be a cosmic lesson, something writ large on the canvas of my life that imparted a universal truth.

“And so it’s over.  And there was no revelation.” (Cancer Chronicles, Pt. 55, December 4, 2006)

Three and a half years later and ain’t nothing changed.  No epiphany.  No startling discovery about myself.

On a Thursday, I felt fine.  On a Friday, I was a stage 3 cancer patient.  A year later, I was a cancer survivor.  And while there was much pain and much fear and tremendous anger during that year, I walked away.  The movie was over and the house lights got turned up.

After the reading, I sold and signed some books.  Then I sat with some members of the creative team at the church and we talked about the creation of art in a society that reduces everything it touches to a commodity.

Yeah, I am that pompous.

But I did have a chance to eat barbeque with Chris and Lori, as well as Chris’ parents James and Jane, who I’ve loved since I was but a wee tot.

The food wasn’t brilliant, but the company was perfect.  Jane’s laugh – loud and bubbly and utterly, fantastically unrestrained – was exactly as I remember it 25 years ago.  James’ slow way of talking and quiet little chuckle was exactly as I remember it 25 years ago.

For a minute, those 25 years didn’t exist.  For that, I’ll never be able to thank that quartet enough.  Mostly ‘cause I’m feeling waaaaaay old lately and getting back to that crew meant, at least for an hour or so, I was young and beautiful again.

Now, having put myself in a place where I could be young and beautiful, you’d think I’d have gotten some pix, right?

Not a single one.  Dumbass.

Well, hang on.  I didn’t get any of the quartet or the reading.  But I did get some of Mark Twain.

And, man oh mama, was he tall.

But you’ll have to wait until tomorrow, gentle readers, for that.

Tomorrow night’s episode: the long drive through Kansas, the massive sneezing fit that nearly drove me off the road, cows, and Tom Mix.

Lost In The Heartland….

July 14, 2010 – 7:18 pm by Trey
Category » Random Thoughts

So here we are, day two of what I’ve taken to calling the Wuss Tour (cuz I’m tired all the time, see, and it makes me feel like a wuss.).

In Oklahoma now, with my Grandmother, and had a good time at the gathering she organized.  Sold a few books, had some good dinner.

Last night in Columbia, MO was the same thing.  A dear friend of mine organized a reading at his church (yeah, Trey was in church, glory be), and it was a great crowd.  Lots of laughs and a few sales.

But the highlight so far is not books, or sales, or even seeing family or friends.  The highlight so far is:

That’s right, the world’s largest Mark Twain statue.  At least, I’m guessing it the world’s largest.  It was at least fifty feet tall and was apropos of nothing except Hannibal, Missouri.

By which I mean that, other than the thing being in Twain’s hometown, it had absolutely no connection to anything around it.

On one side was a trailer home and on the other was a garage.

No plaque, no ‘On This Spot In History,’ nothing at all.

Except this statue.

So I whipped off the highway, took a few cell pix, and then hauled out the big gear and took some actual pictures.

And then I was nearly run over by a hillbilly.  Actually, hillbilly-ette.

But that’s another story for another time.

Tomorrow, Lubbock.  Then Midland to see how the old gang has fared…at least those of us not dead or in jail….